Bordeaux Wines |

Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Advertisement

Supported by

Bordeaux Wines

News about Bordeaux Wines, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times. More

Bordeaux is a magic name. It’s a city, a region and a source of fine wines. It’s also a powerful, unassailable brand. The millionaire chateau owner in Margaux and the debt-ridden little winemaker from some distant corner of the appellation can both proudly say, “My wine is a Bordeaux.”

But consistently great Bordeaux wines are a relatively recent phenomenon. There have been many memorable vintages, but until recently, excellence was not routine. The 1929 vintage was superb, but most of the wines of the 1930s were dreadful. Except for 1945, so were most of the vintages in the 1940s. Old-timers still shudder at the mention of 1951, 1954 and 1956. The 1961 vintage was a triumph, but 1963, 1965 and 1968 were barely drinkable.

Deceived by their self-image, Bordeaux winemakers were slow to profit from research and new techniques that had revolutionized winemaking elsewhere. But adapt they did, and by the 1970s their wines began to excel. The 1980s and 1990s were truly golden years in Bordeaux wine country, and the great 2000 vintage was, many Bordelais were convinced, a harbinger of lots of good vintages.

Back in 1855, a group of Bordeaux wine brokers created a five-class ranking of 60 chateaus in the Médoc, north of the city of Bordeaux (and one from Graves, Haut-Brion), that has for a century and a half largely determined how much those chateaus could charge for their wines – and, more important, how much the public was willing to pay.

Since then, with one exception, the rankings have not changed. The premier cru, or first-growth, wines are Lafite-Rothschild, Latour, Margaux and Haut-Brion, the original four, and Mouton-Rothschild, which was elevated from second growth to first in 1973.

In some ways, Bordeaux is a victim of its own success. With the most famous wines – Margaux, Latour, Pétrus, Haut-Brion, Lafite-Rothschild – selling for $800, $1,000 a bottle, many consumers find it difficult to believe that a Bordeaux at $15 or $20 is drinkable. They need not be concerned; there are approximately 7,000 chateaus in the Bordeaux appellation, and many make remarkably good wines at reasonable prices. The most famous wines are invariably excellent, but prices reflect cachet and scarcity as much as quality. Buyers are often wealthy collectors who have no intention of drinking them, or speculators who plan to sell at a handsome profit five or ten years hence.

A succession of good vintages makes specific vintages less important. Starting with 1990, and except for 1991 and 1992, Bordeaux has had a amazing streak of good years, with 1990, 2000 and 2005 ranking among the best ever. Cabernet sauvignon may be the most important grape in Bordeaux, but Americans have often been partial to the softer, fruitier, merlot-based wines of St.-Émilion and Pomerol. These days, though, it’s hard to go wrong with wines from anywhere in Bordeaux in almost any price range.

Bordeaux is not exclusively a red wine region, although about 75 percent of all Bordeaux wine is red. Some of the most famous chateaus, like Margaux and Haut-Brion, produce elegant, dry, white table wines, mainly from sémillon and sauvignon blanc grapes. Sémillon is the principal grape in the incomparable sweet wines from Sauternes and Barsac, communes in the southern reaches of the Bordeaux region.